Electrical computers and digital data processing systems: input/ – Input/output data processing – Input/output access regulation
Reexamination Certificate
2002-04-17
2003-04-01
Gaffin, Jeffrey (Department: 2182)
Electrical computers and digital data processing systems: input/
Input/output data processing
Input/output access regulation
C709S200000, C709S206000, C709S220000, C709S224000, C714S025000
Reexamination Certificate
active
06542943
ABSTRACT:
BACKGROUND
1. Field of Invention
The present invention relates to systems and methods for computer-based customer support, and more particularly, to systems, methods, and products for automatically updating software products from diverse software vendors on a plurality of end-user, client computer systems.
2. Background of Invention
The typical personal computer contains various categories of software products, such as operating system files, utilities, applications, and device drivers, code libraries, and other forms of computer readable or executable information. In some of these categories, such as applications, the personal computer may contain numerous programs in various subcategories. For example, a user may have one or two word processing applications, several graphics applications, and numerous games. Most of these products will come from different software vendors. As used herein “software vendors” includes any entity that distributes software products, even if the entity also manufactures or distributes hardware or other non-software products. These software vendors frequently improve their products, by adding new features, or by fixing known problems, and make these software updates available to their users. These updates may or may not be free.
There are at least three significant problems that the vendors and users face in attempting to provide these updates to the user. First, vendors face difficulty and costs in attempting to inform users of their products that the updates are available, and users experience similar difficulties in attempting to ascertain what updates are available. Vendors typically send out mailings to registered users, place advertisements in relevant trade journals and magazines, and engage in other promotional activities.
For all of these efforts, many users may remain unaware of the many software updates applicable to their systems until they encounter problems and contact the vendors' technical support organizations. Other users only learn about updates by searching the Internet or on-line services for solutions to their technical problems. Just the shear magnitude of the problem of updating all software products can be overwhelming. Given that a user will have many software products from numerous vendors on her computer, it would be nearly impossible for the user to frequently monitor all of the available distribution channels, journals, Internet forums, and the like, to determine for which of the many software products there are updates available.
For example, some vendors maintain sites on the World Wide Web, or electronic bulletin boards (BBS's) that include information about current updates and products, and enable a user to download such updates. However, such sites are obviously dedicated to a single software vendor, and provide information only about that software vendor's products, and certainly not about the products of numerous other vendors that may be interest to a given user. Thus, the user would have to search the Internet, and possibly online services, to determine which vendors have such sites. The user would likely to have visit each of these sites individually and determine what software updates are available from each of them. Similarly, even though some on-line services include forums or other mechanisms where users can learn about available updates, this still places the burden on the user to actively seek out this information. Directories or search engines on the Internet, such as Excite, Yahoo, Lycos, or Infoseek merely provide links to software vendor sites, but do not generally attempt to systematically determine which software updates are available, and provide this information to the user, let alone actually update the software on the user's machine.
Another problem is that even once an update has been identified, there is the need to install it in the user's computer. Many users purchase the software updates by mail order, or the like, and receive them on floppy diskettes. Other users may download the software updates via Internet from the computers of the software vendors, or from on-line services. In any of these cases installing a single update can be a tedious, time-consuming and error-prone process for many users due to the various formats and installation procedures required. Installing updates for all of the numerous software products on a user's system on a regular basis would be even more difficult and time consuming for the typical user.
Finally, many users have concerns about their privacy, and are often resistant to revealing complete information about their software configurations to one or more vendors. However, even for a single vendor, information about which of the vendor's products are installed on a user's computer system, and system configuration information is necessary for determining which updates are applicable to the user's computer system. For example, a certain software update to an accounting program from vendor A might be applicable if the user has a printer from vendor B, and a different software update is applicable if the printer comes from vendor C. The user might not want to let each vendor know about all the components on their system, but this configuration information is necessary to ensure the correct software updated is installed. Still, users are resistant to the prospect of a single vendor storing information profiling the software components that reside on their computer systems.
In summary, from the perspective of an individual vendor, the problems are identifying and notifying every user of the vendor's software of the availability of updates to the software on a timely and useful basis, and ensuring that the proper software updates are installed. From the perspective of the individual user, the problems are systematically and easily identifying which updates are currently available for every piece of software on her system, and resolving the technical difficulties in obtaining and installing such updates.
Accordingly, it is desirable to provide a system that automatically determines which software updates from numerous diverse software vendors are currently available, and which are applicable to a given user's computer system, and installs such user selected ones of such updates on the user's computer. Further, it is desirable to provide such a system without abridging the privacy of users by obtaining and storing system profile information.
SUMMARY OF THE INVENTION
In accordance with one aspect of the present invention, there is provided a system and method that automatically updates software components from numerous diverse software vendors on the computer systems of a plurality of end users. The system includes at least one database that stores software update information for a plurality of software products manufactured by diverse software vendors. The database is maintained by a service provider on a service provider computer system. Alternatively, the database may be maintained by a set of software vendors of the software products in association with the service provider. The software update information in the database specifies the software update program or files and their network location on the computer system of the software vendors, which computer systems are connected over the network to the service provider computer system. The database further stores information that describes an installation process for installing the software update on a user's computer.
In the preferred embodiment the network is the Internet to which the diverse software vendor computer systems are connected, and make available updates for their software. The network location provided in the software update information is specified by one or more universal resource locators (URL). Thus, the update database does not store the software updates themselves, but information that is used to access the software from computer systems of the original vendors. In addition, the software update information includes a format des
Cheng William
Hwang Kenneth
Kannan Ravi
Katchapalayam Babu
Liu Bing
Gaffin Jeffrey
Hamaty Christopher J.
Networks Associates Technology Inc.
Perveen Rehana
Silicon Valley IP Group, LLC
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